If you live in Portland, chances are you’ve been there before and had no idea what its name was. Chances are, most of the Occupiers didn’t know what the block they were descending on was called. Most of the cops probably also said “Shemanki what?” when they got the call. Why? Everyone just thinks of it as part of the Park Blocks. While the collective name “Park Blocks” is the most bandied-about term for the stretch of nicely green land that goes through downtown Portland, it turns out that the individual bits of the Park Blocks actually have names. Shemanski Park is the area around the Shemanski Fountain, just south of Southwest Salmon Street. The block with the Abe Lincoln statue? That’s called Lincoln Square. The block with the Teddy Roosevelt statue? Roosevelt Square.

Shemanski Fountain was the gift of Polish immigrant Joseph Shemanski in 1926. The bronze statue within the fountain is called Rebecca at the Well. The elms that surround Shemanski Park, Lincoln Square, and the rest of it are not native to Oregon. However, it is one of the larger groves of elms in North America, as Portland’s collection of the trees were west of the Rocky Mountains and not wiped out by Dutch elm disease like their eastern brethren were. The whole area has been designated as a public space since 1852, a mere one year after Portland was incorporated, and seven whole years before Oregon statehood. However, folks in 1852 didn’t really have an idea of “parks” back then. It was originally cleared of trees entirely and turned into a plank road. Some twenty years later, the city re-worked it as green space and introduced the non-native elms to the area.

The man who redesigned the area to be a nice, Occupy-able park was none other than Fredrick Law Olmsted. Olmsted is probably the single most famous park developer in American history, designing numerous open spaces throughout the U.S., most famously New York’s Central Park. Olmsted’s sons would carry on his legacy as the Olmsted Brothers landscape design company.

So, that’s what Shemanski Park is. It’s a bit of Portland designed by the greatest landscape architect in American history, a public space whose usage predates statehood, and an area where you can look around and hang out with mostly-extinct trees. But it’s fine if you just call it “the Park Blocks.” Everyone else does.